I need feminism…

The Oxford University Student Union’s Women’s Campaign recently took photos of students on the Oxford University campus holding up sign boards which demonstrated why the particular student thought that they needed feminism. I absolutely loved the responses. Go to the campaign’s Facebook to check them out(http://www.facebook.com/womcam). Below are my favourite. Please note that I sometimes placed the sex of the person next to the response in order to give clarity, and not to cast judgement on the person or their sex.

I need feminism…

…because I cannot be trusted to regulate myself any more than the press, the police and financial services can (from a man)

…because I am still scared of dropping feminist as a dirty F-BOMB

Note: this can also be in reference to the idea that the difference between feminism and misandry is still misunderstood.

…because I don’t want to live in a society that trivialises violence against women

…because I was assigned “female at birth” but never completed the required reading (from a transgender)

…because too much of history was written by white, bourgeois, heterosexual, cisgender men like me (from a man)

Cisgendered/cissexual people (from Wikipedia): Kristen Schilt and Laurel Westbrook define cisgender as a label for “individuals who have a match between the gender they were assigned at birth, their bodies, and their personal identity.” According to Julia Serano, cissexual is an adjective used in the context of gender issues to describe “people who are not transsexual and who have only ever experienced their mental and physical sexes as being aligned